Openhome wrote:Yeah, I know. It makes me SO nervous. I have spent the last two years on my life writing 350,000 words about Alice's life, and it is about to be flushed down the drain.

Meh... we're a lot fond of our "alternate versions", I suppose you could say. Hence why there's so very very very many titles under Twilight if you search fanfiction. Just like Breaking Dawn, I'm sure there are many of us who will prefer your version to SM's.

Openhome wrote:Yeah, I know. It makes me SO nervous. I have spent the last two years on my life writing 350,000 words about Alice's life, and it is about to be flushed down the drain.

Meh... we're a lot fond of our "alternate versions", I suppose you could say. Hence why there's so very very very many titles under Twilight if you search fanfiction. Just like Breaking Dawn, I'm sure there are many of us who will prefer your version to SM's.

Caryn, is right there, I love love love your Alice stories, no matter what SM is going to write down, yours still would be awesome...it's a very good story about Alice and I hope SM read it so she could use that in her book...

These violent delights, have violent endings...Like fire and gunpowder, they consume what they kiss

Let me start off by giving full disclosure. I am a fanfic author who has spent the last year and a half creating fanfics about Alice and Jasper, so I viewed the Guide with a great deal of fear. Having said that, I loved the detail SM gave us. I love even more the detail she left out because it kept my fanfics mostly intact.

Alice's human life was shocking and wonderful at the same time to read. I loved the detail and was truly sad for her as a character. My only critique is that Alice should have been in the asylum longer than that to sustain the damage needed to forget her past. Other than that, it was beautiful. It makes me want to go back and rewrite Alice's transformation scene.

Full disclosure: I am not really any kind of author, but I am a clinical psychologist who has happened to be working a lot lately in neuropsychology, emotional trauma, and brain injury. (The stuff we're discovering lately about brain injury is amazing - sadly, at the expense of injured soldiers and professional sports players.) With the high doses of electroshock they were using back then, especially considering Alice's tiny frame and recent emotional trauma, I am not too surprised that if she were going to forget at all, that she forgot everything almost at once. I am a little surprised that she forgot everything like that, but who knows how a clairvoyant's brain is structured?

Poor Alice! I think she went through more than almost anyone before becoming a vampire. I'm glad that she could forget - I hope she doesn't ever discover the full extent. That vampire groundkeeper must have been really attached to her, or really bored with life, or what, to sacrifice himself like that.

The Guide did a very good job of settling our recent Alice's Team discussion of whether or not Alice "slipped up" in her vegetarian diet. "Sporadic success" is, I guess, a nice way of saying that she ate a lot of people in her earlier years.

I loved the amount of detail put into the cars! I always thought yellow was a nice, perky, Alice kind of color. I never realized how a car could match a personality!

It is so eerie thinking that James was right there at the end of Alice's transformation. And then the thought of Alice waking as a newborn and "scrambling away" to look for blood...

I am loving these backstories. And I am so glad James is dead.

"It will take an amazing amount of control,” she mused. “More even than Carlisle has. He may be just strong enough…the only thing he’s not strong enough to do is stay away from her. That’s a lost cause.”

Reading Alice's past was sad (obviously) but I could also find a happy element in there too.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I read the books I got the impression that Alice's family didn't care about her at all. Or they once cared, but her predictions were too unnerving for them to deal with and either because of social pressures or because they thought she was better off dead, they had a tombstone for her.

I actually took great comfort in Alice's story in the bio because it was clear that her mother still loved her very much. I didn't expect that in her story at all. If anything, as I said before, I expected both her to be uncaring, so I found it really very sweet.

Of course, I also took great delight in the fate of her father!

I wasn’t born a compassionless shrew. I used to be sort of nice, you know - Leah Clearwater, Breaking Dawn, p.316

Openhome wrote:My only critique is that Alice should have been in the asylum longer than that to sustain the damage needed to forget her past.

I totally agree, because in Twilight they discussed it after Bella wakes up in the hospital, there is a line that clearly state a long time that Alice stayed there.
"because she was always in the dark." it was the line I think Bella said after Edward pointed out that Alice was in the dark about her past....

These violent delights, have violent endings...Like fire and gunpowder, they consume what they kiss

So, finaly made it here. I loved reading Alice's story. It was very tragic and it makes me glad she can't remember it.

marielle wrote:

Openhome wrote:My only critique is that Alice should have been in the asylum longer than that to sustain the damage needed to forget her past.

I totally agree, because in Twilight they discussed it after Bella wakes up in the hospital, there is a line that clearly state a long time that Alice stayed there.
"because she was always in the dark." it was the line I think Bella said after Edward pointed out that Alice was in the dark about her past....

Well, she must have been in the asylum for at least a couple of months right? Her head was shaved some time after entering the asylum (not directly when she was admitted) and her hair had already grown back some before she was changed. Plus I agree with smitten_by_twilight, that what they were doing, was absolutely horrendous. It actually surprises me that memory loss was the only thing that happend to her. I study farmaceutical sciences and we actually had a class about neuropathology recently. We also talked about electroshock therapy and how they first experimented with it to treat schizophrenia. It was terrible, it still makes me sick just thinking about it. I feel so sad that someone as good and pure and happy as Alice had to go through that. Especially knowing there was nothing wrong with her, people were just scared of her gift.

A little background for those interested: Apparently they found that people with epilepsy never had schizophrenia, so they thought epileptic seizures could cure schizophrenia patients. They didn't have a clue what they were doing, but they took some vagrant of the streets with signs of schizophrenia and this is what happend: "They thought, 'Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second. That's not going to do anything terrible to him.' So they did that. [...] This fellow — remember, he wasn't even put to sleep — after this major grand mal convulsion, sat right up, looked at these three fellows and said, 'What the f*** are you a******s trying to do?' Well, they were happy as could be, because he hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation."
They experimented with higher voltages and for longer periods of time too. The patients didn't recieve any type of anesthetics or muscle relaxants so they were completely consious during the proces. The produced seizures were so strong that the muscles could contract to the point of breaking the bones that they were attached to. Patients could recieve 10 to 20 shocks within days.
(Only thing is that the first electroshock in humans was done in 1937, well after Alice was changed. Before that they induced seizures with drugs. But in the name of fiction, I will forget that little detail.)
If you are really interested in it here is a video of a surgeon (Sherwin Nuland) who talks about the history of it and his own experiences. He actually recieved electroshock therapy himself. I saw this video during my neuropathology class and it's a very inspiring story.

Jeakat wrote:I actually took great comfort in Alice's story in the bio because it was clear that her mother still loved her very much. I didn't expect that in her story at all. If anything, as I said before, I expected both her to be uncaring, so I found it really very sweet.

Of course, I also took great delight in the fate of her father!

Absolutely. I wonder how the mother would have felt about her husband putting his daughter in an asylum.
What happend to her father? Did I miss that part?

corona wrote:He watched her wake and scramble away to look for blood...

It is so eerie thinking that James was right there at the end of Alice's transformation. And then the thought of Alice waking as a newborn and "scrambling away" to look for blood...

Totally agree here. I hate to think what would have happend if James stayed and Alice became a part of his coven. Would she have had the visions of Jasper and the Cullens if she was stuck with James?

smitten_by_twilight wrote:That vampire groundkeeper must have been really attached to her, or really bored with life, or what, to sacrifice himself like that.

I wonder what he saw in her. Maybe he knew that she wasn't really "sick". Or maybe he liked her cheerful character in this misserable place.

Absolutely. I wonder how the mother would have felt about her husband putting his daughter in an asylum.
What happend to her father? Did I miss that part?

Yeah, it was a little bit at the end of the bio. Eventually the police caught up with him and when he couldn't produce Alice, they tried him for both her murder and her mothers, and he was found guilty on both counts!

I wasn’t born a compassionless shrew. I used to be sort of nice, you know - Leah Clearwater, Breaking Dawn, p.316

Absolutely. I wonder how the mother would have felt about her husband putting his daughter in an asylum.
What happend to her father? Did I miss that part?

Yeah, it was a little bit at the end of the bio. Eventually the police caught up with him and when he couldn't produce Alice, they tried him for both her murder and her mothers, and he was found guilty on both counts!

Are you sure? Maybe you're confusing with Bree's story...

"When Kate met Garrett, she found something she'd never found [...]. She is currently attempting monogamy for the first time in her long life." S. M. The guide p. 157